I'm Toby, I was a writer for the Morning Brew and now lead content at Launch House. AMA 🔥

Toby Howell
51 replies
I'm Toby Howell, I helped write the Morning Brew newsletter for 1.5 years and grew Launch House’s newsletter to 15k in under 5 months I’m the content lead for launch house and the author of Homescreen a newsletter read by 15k founders covering the startup and tech ecosystem. Ask me anything about Twitter and newsletter growth strategies, content creation, drops, and community building. I’ll be answering all questions on August 17th!

Replies

Laura Mesa
Hi Toby - wondering how you balance reactive content/breaking news vs. planned or evergreen content?
deepu
I am a huge fan of morning brew, robinhood and launch house newsletters. - For someone who's getting started to write newsletters, what are your tips on content and growth?
Toby Howell
@pradeeb28 Tips on Content: Constraints are your friend: Whatever platform you are creating on, set a target cadence for your content. If you commit to sending 3 times a week, the anxiety around writing fades away because you know that the content has to get out. It’s counterintuitive, but constraints end up freeing you up to be more creative. Trust your gut: We all consume content and have a barometer for what we do and don’t like. When it comes time to create yourself, create something that you would want to consume. Not only will it lead to better content but you’ll enjoy the process and outcome more. Tips on growth: Throw events/meetups: It’s really hard to get people to care about your newsletter. A good way to get a core group of users is to begin hosting regular meetups and signing people up manually. Developing these relationships and gathering subs manually is super time intensive but will pay off in the long run. Morning Brew gathered subs manually by singing up students in businesses classes while at college. Since we’re past college, you have to gather the people yourself but the same concept applies. Launch on PH: We gained around 2,500 subs from launching here. But don’t just throw up a generic landing page. Put in the effort to make your landing page unique, create some killer slides, and hammer all your channels for distribution and you should do alright.
Sandra Idjoski
How did you get the initial subscribers to your newsletter? Do you have some tips for founders who don't have too much time on how to create an interesting and engaging newsletter?
Toby Howell
@sandra_idjoski If you don’t have the time to create a newsletter, don’t do it! Newsletters are a lot of work—both to write and to grow. I would recommend tackling the lower hanging fruit first like LinkedIn, Twitter, and TikTok. Whatever platform you are most comfortable on, double down on that first to build an initial audience. Down the line if you have more bandwidth and/or find an awesome writer, then you can go the newsletter route using the audience you already built as a jumping off point.
Flavius Mardare
SUPER EXCITED about this! 🔥 What are your top community-building strategies for Web3 projects/companies? Engineer founder here trying to understand how to create those INCREDIBLY engaged and genuine communities on Twitter.
Toby Howell
@flavius_mardare Web3 community building is the same as any other community building. Please please please stay away from buying followers. Web3 is still such a scammy ecosystem and populating your Discord or Twitter with low-quality followers will crush your project before it even gets off the ground. I’m going to parrot my advice from above and advise you to work on developing a core nucleus of power community members by hosting in-person meetups. Not sure where you are based, but use Twitter to host founder/engineer meetups, meet people that way, and build your community from the ground up. Back in the day, this was how Instagram fostered community hosting meetups called Instameets. People would come and take pics together and get to know each other. Instagram is massive now obviously but it started small and grassroots. I recommend doing the same.
Tom Orbach
Many say that the opening / 1st sentence is most important. Do you agree? What are your top tips for writing that opening section (of anything practically)?
Toby Howell
@tom_orbach I definitely agree that the first sentence is important. I like using the lede of my story in tandem with my headline. By extending a joke made in the headline, it makes people reread both the headline and the first sentence which helps grab their attention for the rest of the story. There’s also the rule of 3 in comedy. Your first joke will likely be decent. Your second edit will be better, but most stop there. The people who fight to find that third edit are the ones who produce the best writing.
Stas Voronov
Could you recommend books for beginners in writing? Maybe something specific for SaaS founders or tech founders and about long-form posts.
Toby Howell
@stas_voronov Steven King's "On Writing" and Anne LaMonte's "Bird by Bird" are my two favorite books on writing.
Sergei Petrov
Thanks for the session, this is a very important topic. 🙏 I do more of the technical part, but I would be interested to read this discussion.
Alexander Isora 🦄
Hey Toby. Nice to meet you. I'm a big fan of Morning Brew <3 Could you please post 5 must-follow persons on Twitter? Thanks ✌️
Anat M
Hi Toby, Big fan of your newsletters! I would love to hear how you manage to increase the newsletter subscribers with such impressive numbers! also, my company (trinityaudio,ai) is all about, well, audio. Do you think adding an audio version to a newsletter is in demand?
Following the conversation to get your valuable insights.
Victoria Koval
Huge fan of the Morning Brew - the newsletter is just so inspiring. Thanks for all you work! The only question I have - how do you get to be so cool? Anything you would recommend beginners who want to write better?
Toby Howell
@viky_koval the only way to write better is to write more! its a slow and painful process but read a lot of good writing, then try to emulate it yourself do this process over and over again till you suck a little less. I'm just trying to suck a little less every day
Aditya
Hey Toby! Curious to get a sneak peek of your content calendar. Want to know how do you define your brand language and what's the best way to transmit it to other verticals of the startup to maintain consistency?
Toby Howell
@adityavsc I'm not a huge fan of content calendars when it comes to social actually. I prefer to immerse myself in the daily flow and post content as it comes to me. Definitely not standard but it's what works best for me. As for brand language, we defined it in a doc, but the best way to ensure consistency is to train content creators personally, then edit their content. They'll pick up on what you're looking for and your brand language will stay consistent. Or just create everything yourself! Easiest way to keep consistent lol.
Sneha Saigal
I really enjoy all your content, Toby. For how long have you been working on your Twitter growth? Given your experiences, you probably get a lot of DMs from those wanting to learn from you/pick your brain, what do you usually do?
Shawn Myers
Hey Toby! Curious to know what some of your favorite tools are when it comes to growing and engaging online communities?
W3nzel
Hi Toby, thanks for doing this. I'm currently helping grow a movie NFT project (movieshots.io). The NFT space is full of sketchy figures and it isn't easy to establish a brand without a huge budget and big influencers. Do you have an idea how to grab the attention of the NFT crowd? Thankful for any kind of pointer! :) Have a great day.
Jeremy Guttenplan
Hi! Our company is having problems delivering specifically to Yahoo/AOL addresses. We have a separate IP for marketing and account servicing, but even the servicing one keeps getting caught for password reset emails. Sender reputation score doesn't seem to be the issue, and we have no problems delivering to Google. Is there something special we have to do for Yahoo deliverability?
Alex Buran
Hi Toby. I had an office in WeWork next to Morning Brew back in 2019 and saw the meteoric rise of your startup. Question. Did your company sponsor the lunch meals every day or it was tied to some kind of KPI goals or occasions?
Dylan Scott
What are the best strategies for professional brands getting into TikTok? Something I love about 60 second startup is the scrappiness question. What advice do you have for content creators that want to incorporate scrappiness into their tik toks, but may be restricted by brand voice among other social channels?
Cindy Qiu
I'll be taking notes! Can you talk about emerging platforms and how to decide when/how to jump in? BeReal, Geneva, etc etc... soooo many to keep up with
Satish Gaire
What are some ideas to grow a newsletter like morning brew?